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Old Scientist: 50 years of deadly transport

5 January 2015

By Mick O'Hare

Safety first – that’s our motto. Looking back through the New Scientist archive it seems to have always been on our minds – especially when it comes to transport. In January 1963, we were looking into air-crash investigation. In the days before GPS tracking, the most reliable way to pinpoint the time of a crash was to check the watches on the corpses of passengers and take an average. “These generally stop on impact,” we noted coldly. It was all in the name of greater safety, however, and our recommendation was to introduce “automatic recorders carried on the aircraft itself, protected against fire and the forces of impact”. These so-called black boxes are now, of course, ubiquitous.

By January 1990, underground travel was making us anxious. Would it be safe to carry passengers inside their cars through the Channel Tunnel being dug between the UK and France? The fear was that it would be difficult to evacuate passengers in the event of a fire. Safety consultants had concluded that “passengers would only have a few minutes to escape from a serious fire” but the counter-argument was that to house all car passengers in a separate train carriage would require a more expensive train and extend loading time. Expediency ultimately won out and today’s passengers remain in their cars on the cross-channel shuttle.

By January 2009 we were fretting about space travel. New Scientist reported that the sun’s ability to shield the solar system from harmful cosmic rays was likely to falter. This was because the sun’s activity is set to enter a lull, reducing the solar wind that diverts the cosmic rays – which is bad news for astronauts. “Beyond the Earth’s protective magnetic field their exposure to cosmic rays could cause cancer and fertility loss,” we reported. Not good – but at least their watches would still be running.